Nearing my 20s, it’s surprising how much I still love animation. The 2D old-style kind. I’ve always been a TV and film enthusiast, much like a large quantity of the population, and since childhood, animation has remained an entertaining constant for me. I personally came across the genre of Anime only over the last few years but it has quickly become one of the most enjoyable parts of my television experience.

The versatile artwork and limitless plot possibilities are what I appreciate most about Anime, despite them sometimes heavily relying on the strange and the imaginary. Making the impossible possible is what anime does best - zodiac mythology, the supernatural and even a simple high school love story are a mere few kinds of things to expect in this massive television genre. Each show also has its own unique twist no matter how cliché or typical, uncommon throughout everyday television by comparison where I always seem to draw similarities.

Here are some of my favourites that are great places to start if you are watching anime for the first time:

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Action/Adventure/Magic

Debatably the most popular anime out there, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood follows two brothers who fail to resurrect their dead mother using alchemy and in the process the youngest loses his body, forcing it to be turned into metal, and the oldest loses an arm and a leg. All they want now is to return to their regular bodies, but to do that they have to find the Philosophers Stone, which turns out can only be located if they join forces with the military.

Death Note

Mystery/Slice of Life/Action/Supernatural

So far, this has to be my all time favourite anime; it mixes the everyday and the supernatural together engagingly and realistically. Death Note focuses on intelligent student Light Yagami, who finds an enchanted notebook owned by the mystical Shinigami Ryuk which holds the power to kill at the stroke of a pen. He decides to use the Death Note to bring his vision for the world to life, setting out to eliminate all criminals from the world and become a socially considered god. But the equally intelligent, world-famous L is on his case, determined to locate Light at all costs.

Ouran High School Host Club

Romance/Humour/Slice of Life

This is a show a friend recommended to try and get me into more chick-flick (as you could see it) anime. This series is set in the prestigious Ouran High School where Haruhi Fujioka, a female lower-class scholarship student, stumbles into an unused music room in search for a quiet place to study only to find the Host Club, a group of boys who entertain female students for profit. After breaking an expensive vase belonging to the group, Haruhi is made a Host to repay the damages, but she must keep up a rouse that she is a boy.